Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  The guy with no teeth, Kiku learned, was Tatsuo—Tatsuo de la Cruz, from the Philippines. He and Hashi, who had been hiding nearby during the rescue, lived together on the second floor of a small tin-roofed factory building, where Hashi now silently led them. Beneath the bare light bulb at the bottom of the stairs, a pregnant woman was stooping with difficulty to put polish on her toenails. She straightened up just long enough to swat a moth fluttering around the light, sending a few flecks of powdered gold drifting down onto her wet nails.

  The room on the second floor was dim and smelled of piss. A plastic hose wound in through one window to a garbage pail full of cloudy brown water where Hashi washed his hands. The tatami matting had been stripped away, and the floor was spread instead with a square of canvas that might once have been a painter’s back-cloth. In the center of the room was a small table with two cups crusted with dried tea bags. The other furnishings included a black and white TV, a cassette recorder, and a vanity table. Vanity table… Now that Kiku thought about it, there was something odd about Hashi: he seemed to be wearing makeup. His eyebrows had been plucked and his face had a light coat of powder on it. Without a word or a glance at Kiku, Hashi went to the mirror. It was Tatsuo instead who spoke.

  “So, did you get a load of my handiwork, Jock? The way I blew away those grunts? Made the gun myself, a sawed-off shotgun. Not fuckin’ bad, huh? Nobody else in Japan can make a gun like that. Modeled it after one they called the Liberator that the partisans used in Europe in WWII. Hey, Jock, you know what ‘Liberator’ means? Huh?… Nah, I guess you physical types don’t spend much time studying… I’d been wanting to make a beauty like this since way back, and I would’ve called mine a Liberator if it’d turned out just like the partisans’; but it was tricky figuring out how to keep the recoil down and still pack a big bang. Maybe I’ll work it out someday. Anyway I call this baby a Getaway, after a movie I saw as a kid. There was this American guy in the movie, had his hair cut real short, and he was always blasting people with a shotgun…”

  As he jabbered on, Tatsuo moved around the room poking into old paper bags and a disintegrating box filled with shuttlecocks and shoehorns. “That’s weird,” he said as he finished his search, “I was sure we had some mercurochrome somewhere.”

  He went to the bucket and wet a handkerchief, mumbling continually, half to himself and half to Kiku: “So just keep that in mind, pole boy: I’ve got a shotgun.” When he handed him the handkerchief to wipe his bloody cheek, Kiku noticed Tatsuo’s hand was trembling.

  “OK then, Jock, I’m going out to buy you something to put on that cut,” he said finally, turning to leave. When he reached the door, though, he looked back to deliver a last word of warning. “But don’t you forget it: me and my Getaway here, we don’t like being made a fool of. I’d take you outside right now and show you a little of what this Getaway can do, but there’s an old guy lives down there called the Quaker, and when he hears loud noises he gets all upset and screams ‘Earthquake!’ loud enough to make you deaf. It’s like a fit, I guess, but he sure makes one helluva noise, and then he kind of collapses in a heap, poor guy.”

  “Must have been scared by an earthquake once,” said Kiku softly, his eyes on the floor.

  “He said something!” laughed Tatsuo, slapping Hashi on the shoulder. “The pole boy can speak! And for a jock it wasn’t half bad. We didn’t even have to knock him around to get him to talk. You know, kid, Hashi here really likes you. When we saw you trying to vault your way in, he said to me right away, ‘You go help him.’ Yeah, he sure does like you… What was I talking about? Oh, the Quaker. No, you’re wrong about him. He doesn’t hate earthquakes. You see, he was a security guard since he was thirteen years old. Sixty years he worked as a guard, saving up his salary the whole time and buying emergency rations and canned goods and bottled water. Then a few years back he got sick, some kind of lump on his spine so he can hardly walk, can’t even take a piss by himself, and what do you think? His family leaves him here in Toxitown with nothing but a barrow full of his old emergency rations. So now he says earthquakes are the only thing you can count on, that he worked those sixty years for an earthquake. And whenever anything happens, he starts yelling ‘Earthquake!’ louder than the real thing. Pretty interesting neighbors we got here, don’t you think? This is a pretty good place… And I’m a pretty good guy,” said Tatsuo, bringing the rapid-fire monologue to a sudden end. “I’m off for the medicine,” he added, and with a wave to Kiku he disappeared through the door.

  Hashi, still seated in front of the mirror, opened a jar of cream and began rubbing it on his face.

  “Where can you buy medicine at this time of night?” Kiku wanted to know. It was one in the morning.

  “You’re in the city, Kiku. There’s an all-night market,” said Hashi, speaking for the first time. He continued staring at the mirror. His voice, at least, was much the same, Kiku thought. “I work at The Market myself, and I’ve got to get going pretty soon. When Tatsuo gets back with the medicine, you should try to get some sleep. We can talk tomorrow.”

  Hashi seemed to have lost some weight, but he knew what he was doing with the makeup, brushing on pale blue eye shadow with a practiced hand. Kiku caught a whiff of perfume on the warm night air: it was a woman’s smell, like the smell that came from between the legs of the foreign whore at the Hotel Springtime.

  “Hashi,” he said, “do they make you dress like that where you work?”

  “Kiku, please—could we drop it for now? I feel like my head’s going to burst, you showing up all of a sudden like this. Like I said, we’ll talk about it tomorrow… we’ll talk about everything tomorrow.”

  Hashi pulled off his T-shirt and put on a cream-colored bra, stuffing it with mounds of sponge. Then he put on a pink shirt, tying the shirttails across his stomach. From behind he could have been a small-assed girl.

  “There’re some blankets in that closet, and if you get hungry Tatsuo can fix you something to eat,” he said, getting into a pair of high-heeled sandals. Kiku noticed the green nail polish on his delicate toenails and the silver chain around his ankle. Hashi opened the door and stood for a moment with his back to him.

  “How’s Milk?” he asked.

  “Milk’s fine, but Kazuyo’s dead. I brought you one of her bones.” As he bent down to unravel the thread that held the bone in his trouser cuff, Kiku was suddenly, inexplicably furious. Kazuyo’s face, with its scarlet death shroud, floated up before him, bringing with it the fear and anger of that night. He remembered the feeling of being sealed inside something tight and pulpy. He felt he had to tell Hashi, to ask him if he too had felt trapped, to tell him about the fear. He wanted Hashi to know about the voice the night she had died, the one that said that nobody needed him, that he was completely useless. He wanted to tell Hashi that the voice was meant for him too, and he wanted him to know about DATURA, and how he would be able to kill them all if he could only get his hands on some. But most of all he wanted to ask Hashi why he was dressed up like a girl. Instead, he took the bone, which he’d finally managed to extract from his cuff, and threw it on the floor. Hashi turned to look, his face screwed up with pain and his shoulders heaving softly.

  “Some asshole knocked into her while we were searching for you in Shinjuku and she fell and hit her head. It killed her. Do you remember how she used to sit up in bed sometimes at night? It was kind of spooky, remember? She always said the same thing: that she got to thinking about how she would end up dying and she couldn’t sleep. She’d just sit there blubbering away like a little kid, holding us until she fell asleep. Remember? Well, she probably never imagined she’d die spitting blood in a creaky bed in some stinking hotel. But you’re lucky, Hashi—you didn’t have to be there to see it… you’re really lucky…” Kiku was almost in tears as everything that had been bottled up since Kazuyo’s death came spilling out. When he was done, he felt drained.

  “I’ve got to get going,” said Hashi, averting his eyes from the bone lying on the f
loor.

  “It’s part of her. Just take one look, just spend one second thinking about her.”

  “I haven’t got time—I’m late as it is.”

  “Just say a little prayer and go. It won’t take a minute.”

  Hashi turned. Tears were streaming down his face. “Stop it!” he screamed. “Think for once how I feel, what kind of situation I’m in!”

  “Situation my ass,” Kiku muttered, grabbing a plate of leftover spaghetti from the table and hurling it against the wall. Hashi sat down at the top of the stairs and began to whimper. Just then, Tatsuo returned.

  Seeing his friend in tears, Tatsuo lunged at Kiku, but Kiku stepped inside and landed an open hand hard on his jaw, sending him rolling into a corner of the kitchen. He then took Hashi by the shoulders and shook him. “What the hell are you doing here?” he yelled. “Did you find that woman who left you in the locker? Is that it? Say something!”

  Through his tears, Hashi could only mumble “I’m sorry,” over and over again. “It’s all my fault. I’m sorry, Kiku, I really am. I just wanted to be a singer. I’m sorry for everything.” His odd, nasal voice slowly filled the room like a fog, settling on Kiku’s skin, sinking in through his pores, and calming the anger and anxiety that had been streaming through him a moment before. He wanted to tell Hashi how lonely he’d been since he left the island, but he couldn’t.

  Suddenly Hashi screamed “No! Don’t!” Tatsuo had recovered and was now aiming his gun at Kiku. Hashi flung himself at Kiku and they both went flying just as he pulled the trigger. The light bulb and a piece of the wall shattered, and the room went dark.

  “I’ll kill any fucker who messes with Hashi or thinks he can make a fool out of me,” they could hear him muttering. Hashi lit his lighter to find Kiku, in one piece, brushing bits of glass from his hair as he got to his feet.

  “Eaaarthquaaake!” a hoarse voice bellowed from below. “Banzai! Banzai! Turn off the gas! EARTHQUAKE!!!”

  “Can’t call this place boring, anyway,” said Kiku. Nodding, Hashi began to laugh.

  Tatsuo had been born in Japan, the son of Laguno de la Cruz and Lurie de Leon, both from Cebu City in the Philippines. The couple had come to Japan in 1969, he to work as a musician, she as a dancer, but lacking any real talent, they had found it difficult to make a living in the city. After knocking around in increasingly mediocre shows, they ended up in a touring company working small towns in the provinces. Six months later, Lurie got pregnant and couldn’t take the constant traveling any longer, so they signed a contract with a hot-spring hotel northwest of Tokyo. The terms of the contract were terrible; the four band members and three dancers got up at 5:00 A.M. to help make breakfast and were kept busy until the floorshow in the nightclub ended at midnight. Still, they preferred it to life in Cebu, and in time their hard work and reliability made them friends in the place.

  Tatsuo was born in the winter of 1971. As soon as he was old enough to toddle around on his own, they started training him to be an acrobat, and by the time he was five he was performing in the dinner show at the hotel with Emiko, the daughter of one of the other dancers. They were something of a hit. Emiko, a “half”—Filipina and Japanese—was three years older than Tatsuo, and had a crush on him. In fact, he was the pet of the whole hotel, the front desk clerk even nominally adopting him so he could have Japanese citizenship and attend elementary school. Twice a year, Tatsuo and Emiko would give a benefit at a hospital nearby for people with leprosy, which earned them a certificate of merit from the local government.

  The summer of the year he was to enter junior high school, Tatsuo made a crucial discovery. He was poking around in a closet looking for mosquito coils when he found a strange bundle wrapped in several layers of paper. Inside was a gun. It was a working model of a Browning revolver that his father had smuggled in piece by piece and assembled himself, and with it were more than a hundred .22 bullets. His hands were shaking uncontrollably, but he took both the gun and the ammunition and hid them under the floor mats.

  After that, whenever he could find the time, Tatsuo would stuff the gun under his shirt and escape into the mountains for a bit of target practice. Sometimes, when something was bothering him, or to celebrate his birthday or whatever, he’d stand on the side of a hill, the earth reeking of sulfur from the hot springs, and shoot straight up into the air. He began buying books and magazines about firearms to learn more about how they were made. One day in the mountains, he shot his first living thing: a cock pheasant. He got it at such close range the head came right off. The recoil and the satisfying shudder that went through him afterward drove home the fact that killing things was pretty easy. And it wasn’t long before it occurred to him that it might be that much more interesting, and no more difficult, to shoot a human being. Unfortunately, however, he remembered a line from a gun book he particularly trusted: “Never fire unless the situation has become absolutely hopeless, and even then fire only to intimidate your adversary.” Tatsuo couldn’t read the characters for “intimidate” and so interpreted the passage to mean that one could only shoot people when the situation was “absolutely hopeless.”

  From that time on, he began to pray for one of these desperate situations to turn up. The chances of being attacked by savages or stormtroopers in a small hot-spring resort were, admittedly, slim, but this didn’t prevent him becoming more and more impatient to try his hand at shooting someone. It’s because I’m really a Filipino, he told himself—I’m not cut out for this soggy old Japanese mountain town. He would look at pictures of Cebu and long for the warmth of the sun to thaw him out, melt those icebound shapes outside which often looked to him like guns.

  The winter he turned fourteen, the hotel was full of skiers, and Tatsuo and Emiko were still doing their routine for the dinner show. One evening, a young drunk leapt up on the stage while Emiko was in the middle of a handstand and started to pull off her leotard. When the emcee and one of the stagehands tried to get the man to leave, he began tossing chairs around the room. Some of his friends joined in, smashing plates, turning over tables, and yelling “She’s a Filipina, she’s got to be a stripper!” Emiko stood alone on the stage in her torn costume, crying her eyes out. At this point, the manager arrived on the scene, and Tatsuo overheard him mumble to himself “Absolutely hopeless.”

  “What did you say?” asked Tatsuo.

  “I said it looks absolutely hopeless,” the manager repeated, running to phone the police.

  Tatsuo was bursting with excitement. Here it was when he least expected it: the longed-for situation. He ran to his room for the gun and was back outside the ballroom in almost no time, but when he kicked in the door and yelled “Get your hands up!” the melee was already over and the staff had begun cleaning up the mess. By then, however, it was too late to dampen Tatsuo’s enthusiasm, and he ended up pulling the trigger anyway. Three times. One shot caught a maid in the shoulder as she was sweeping up a pile of broken glass.

  Tatsuo, after being evaluated by a psychiatrist, was packed off to an institution for troubled youths. Two months later, at Emiko’s urging and with her help, he escaped, and the pair went to Tokyo. Tatsuo found work operating a lathe in a machine shop, but everything about the place reminded him of guns, and before long he was making his own. When he had four working models, he hit on the idea of selling three to buy ammunition, but almost as soon as he showed up with the homemade guns at a firearms store, he was arrested. He spent the next three years being shunted from the court system to a mental hospital and finally to a home for juvenile delinquents. His only visitor during this time was Emiko, who told him that his parents had gone back to the Philippines.

  By the end of his time in there, he was determined, again with Emiko’s help, to turn over a new leaf. Still, he knew he couldn’t live without guns, so he decided to join the army. When he appeared at the recruiting office, however, the officers in charge found it hard not to laugh, saying that they’d never had the pleasure of reviewing a candidate who had not o
nly failed to graduate from junior high school but came to them fresh from an institution.

  Tatsuo and Emiko retired to an obscure section of Tokyo, where Emiko got work in a cabaret. Then, one night, she didn’t come home. Asking around, Tatsuo learned that she was working as an acrobat at a place called The Market in Toxitown, and that was when he decided to slip through the fence himself and do what he could to find her. He made guns he sold to gangsters to support himself while he searched, and eventually he fell in with a fairy with a sweet voice who lived on the second floor of this old factory. “And that was Hashi,” Tatsuo said to end his story, as he painted the mercurochrome on Kiku’s cheek.

  The hole made by the barbed wire took four days to heal; four days of listening to Tatsuo’s nonstop chatter every time Hashi went off to work. It started with his autobiography, moved on to Hashi’s job, then the history and specifications of every conceivable type of firearm, the lowdown on every character in the neighborhood, and so forth. Late in the evening, Hashi would put on his makeup and leave for The Market, not to return until almost dawn, if then; according to Tatsuo he was going to “singing lessons.” During the day he mostly slept, waking only when the sun was already low in the sky. Then he would make dinner for Kiku and Tatsuo, which, since Kiku had arrived, consisted of their old favorite, rice omelettes. The hotplate, Kiku gathered, like everything else electric in Toxitown, ran off power siphoned illegally from city power lines. As they picked at their meal, Kiku and Hashi talked almost exclusively about what they could remember of the old days at the orphanage.

  It didn’t take much imagination for Kiku to figure out what Hashi did when he went off to The Market in drag. Remembering the lump-man at Blind Mice, he tried not to think about it. On the fourth evening, however, as Hashi sat down to put on his makeup, Kiku announced that he was going with him. “I’ve got some shopping to do,” he said.